The Russian State Duma has voted in two new laws on military conscription in Russia, with the conscription age bracket now to be expanded to 18 to 30 years from the previous age of 18 to 27 years. The provision on raising the draft age, if approved by the Federation Council and signed into law by the President Vladimir Putin, will come into force on 1 January, 2024. 

Earlier this week Putin signed a law raising the reserve age limit for former servicemen.

bne IntelliNews warned that the Kremlin government appears to be preparing for a second wave of mass mobilisation, while Russia is facing a mounting labour crisis as worker shortages grow and the labour market shows the lowest number of young workers since the early 1990s.

“This law is drafted for big war, a general mobilisation. And it already smells like this big war,” one of the authors of the bill, ex-Deputy Defence Minister Andrei Kartapolov, told the State Duma as cited by The Bell.

The new laws also regulate the previously passed electronic conscription and the data that will be available to the military conscription information resource. To remind, in November 2022 the Kremlin refused to sign the law officially ending the mobilisation, and ordered the call-up data to be digitalised.

The institutions which will provide data to be entered into the state conscription database are the Federal Tax Service, the Federal courts, medical organisations via the mediation of the Ministry of Health and educational institutions via the mediation of the Ministry of Education and Science.

The legislation confirmed previously passed rules that merely issuing an electronics draft notice to an individual will be enough for a citizen subject to military duty to be temporarily prohibited from travelling outside Russia. The law formulates this as "temporary measure aimed at ensuring the appearance of summons,” as cited by RBC business portal.

The database will also automatically generate a notice should a draftee fail to report to the military registration office within 20 days, and apply other cross-institutional bans: a ban on registration as an individual entrepreneur or self-employed person, a restriction on the use of car licences, a ban on car registration and on the conclusion of credit or loan agreements.